Five Things: Trespassing, Carl von Ossietzky, Middle East, Curiosity, Smartphones
Your Sunday Morning starts here. Really.
Hello and welcome back to Five Things!
The countdown to Christmas is on and the temperatures are rising again. Instead of a White Christmas we’ll have a warm Christmas again, while people still think global warming is a myth and they don’t have to change anything at all. I don’t understand why people are always so afraid of change, especially if it just a different engine in their car or a solar panel on their roof.
We’re headed into the last work week before Christmas, the kids will be out of school by Thursday and our oldest daughter will come home from university in Sweden on Thursday as well. She petted a reindeer last week when she went up to the polar circle and I don’t think it can get any more christmassy than that. Also, our kids have started to compile a long list of Christmas movies they want to watch together, so I assume they won’t much notice the weather outside. I’m already compiling recipes for Christmas Day as I always cook the same thing, but differently. Our family tradition is a traditional American Thanksgiving turkey for Christmas, because I’m not really a fan of duck or goose. Also, I like Thanksgiving, but we celebrate that differently here in Germany and in October, but we still do Black Friday and Cyber Monday and all these other wonderful traditions. So right now I’m trying to figure out which side-dishes would be crowd-pleasers and which one I would really like and if there’s an overlap…
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check out my Five Things Gift Guide!
give a Five Things Subscription to your loved ones! I’ll even sign a virtual greeting card if you send it to me!
With that out of the way, let’s check out this week’s Five Things!
Trespassing for the Common Good
Did you ever think about why some large portions of land belong to some people, who inherited it from their forefathers? I do. I also studied history. There is still so much privilege attached to owning land. There was just a case just outside of Hamburg where the Bismarck family was able to use a vastly different and favorable tax code for their companies, due to some privileges from when Bismarck was Chancellor and had his estate in the Saxony Forest.
The Journalist the Nazis Could Not Silence
This is the story about Carl von Ossietzky and the campaign to get him the Nobel Prize to save his life. I knew who Carl von Ossietzky was, but not in this detail. He was one of the Moorsoldaten (“peat bog soldiers”), how the prisoners in the concentration camp of Esterwegen called themselves. There was a popular song about the Moorsoldaten in the 70s and my mom used to play it on the guitar. We even had a songbook with the songs from concentration camps. This article is a timely one, as currently arrest lists are being compiled in the USA, just as the Nazis did in 1933 in Germany.
The Middle East’s Dangerous New Normal
The Middle East is an interesting place and I won’t claim to even half understand what’s going on there and who sides with whom right now. This article helps in understanding the situation and how we got there.
Hit the Curiosity Sweet Spot to Speed Up Learning
I’m driven by curiosity and I love figuring out things I don’t know or understand, yet. I had a boss a long time ago who basically told me to be less curious and that I shouldn’t always try to figure out what the latest tech would mean for business and society, because as I aged it would be to stressful for me. I respectfully disagreed.
Smartphones don’t suck. People do
“Boredom can be useful. Like pain or hunger it alerts us to a need, and feeling bored encourages creative thinking and can prompt people to find something more meaningful and interesting to do. But feeling easily or often bored is associated with a whole range of problems, among them underachievement, apathy, depression, anxiety, over-eating, drug abuse, social aggression and even heart problems.
One intriguing study found a link between boredom and political polarisation. Through a series of experiments, the researchers found that a bored individual’s quest for meaning can cause them to gravitate to political extremes. Boredom could, then, be an under-explored contributor to our deeply fractured politics: it certainly makes intuitive sense that a significant proportion of trolls, online extremists and conspiracy theorists act the way they do because they are bored out of their internet-addled minds.” - think about that when you’re bored the next time and you reach for your phone and you scroll endlessly and watch stupid reels and you still feel bored…
That’s it. Have a great Sunday! If you missed last Sunday’s edition of Five Things, have a look here:
— Nico